In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon scrutinizes the sexual content in Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), the well-known seventeenth-century Chinese novel filled with social satire and portrayals of material culture and gender roles reflecting conditions in Ming China (1368–1644). McMahon argues that the sexual content in Jin Ping Mei is thematically, aesthetically, and socially significant: the novel “uses sexual descriptions to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being” (5). He goes on to demonstrate how this content combines a notable degree of erudition and refinement with a graphically vulgar use of language that fully emerged into writing during the Ming dynasty.

Aware of the Eurocentric connotations of the term ‘pornography,’ McMahon employs it to highlight four main aspects of the novel’s sexual content. First, the term, insofar as it suggests smut, accurately reflects the centuries-long condemnation and censorship of this “salacious book” (yin shu). Second, the term emphasizes the universality of at least a person’s potential for wantonness: “under the pornographic eye, no one is exempt from the excesses of sexual desire” (10). Third, the term serves as an accessible marker denoting “explicit portrayals of sexual acts” (11). Fourth, because a central aim of pornographic literature is to titillate readers and thereby to stimulate consumption, the term underlines a possible strategy for marketing the novel in the context of Ming China’s increasingly commercialized publishing industry.

Jin Ping Mei shares with other Ming-Qing pornographic works a number of traits, such as an obsession with extreme pleasure and supernatural fantasy, a shared vocabulary and imagery for describing women’s sexual pleasure, frequent critical allusions to social and political norms, and a persistent message of sexual realism insinuating that readers, just like the characters in the novel, can experience and consume various forms of sexual stimulation. However, as McMahon argues, Jin Ping Mei stands apart for its creatively unique obscenity. For example, pornography often creates spaces in which sexual acts that violate social norms become permissible, without much questioning or reflection. By contrast, the sexual content in Jin Ping Mei, even when somewhat fantastic, is lent an air of permissiveness from the start. In other words, even though many of the novel’s carnal shenanigans are decidedly unrealistic, they follow the logic of the everyday realism that the novel ascribes to the characters’ statuses, personalities, and situational circumstances. In other words, sexual “description varies depending on the situation and the partner” (71).

Saying All That Can Be Said elaborates on its general framework in Chapter One. Chapter Two analyzes how much of the sexual content in Jin Ping Mei can be traced to a literary genre known as “the art of the bedchamber”—a type of sex manual instructing both men and women on how they can appropriately master sex and avoid the obsessive pursuit of extreme sexual pleasure. The unrestrained pursuit of extreme sexual pleasure, however, forms the central theme of “pornographic” fiction. Chapter Three (“The Language of Sex”) and Chapter Four (“Sex as Battle”) explore in detail the “high erotic” style used in the novel. Chapter Five (“Graphic Description in Jin Ping Mei”) explores the “graphic” style. And Chapter Six (“Different Sex with Different Women”) demonstrates how the sexual descriptions in the novel vary depending on the situation and the partner.

As McMahon discusses in Chapter Two, the art of the bedchamber genre helped to shape a shared sexual imagery and vocabulary, the elements of which pervade Jin Ping Mei. One specific element typical of the genre stands out—sex-enhancing drugs and devices, which Ximen Qing frequently relies on during his various escapades. McMahon situates this element in its historical context: sexual practices involving drugs and devices are known to have prevailed among Ming emperors, officials, and even urban commoners. Moreover, Ximen Qing, as both a wealthy merchant and the owner of a wholesale medicine shop in the novel, has ready access to these sex aids.

McMahon argues that Jin Ping Mei uses two modes of stylized sexual writing: the “high erotic” style and the “graphic” modes. The differences between the two differentiate among Ximen Qing’s various sexual relationships and convey their changing dynamics. The figurative and allusive phrasing of the “high erotic” passages “favors elegant and elliptical description” whereas the plain and direct phrasing of the “graphic” passages “focuses on raw sights and sounds” (67). Jin Ping Mei employs primarily the “high erotic” style to describe sex between socially legitimate, emotionally meaningful partners: Ximen Qing and his main wife and wife-like concubines. Even Ximen Qing’s extramarital dalliances with a high-class courtesan (Zhang Aiyue) and a high-class widow (Lady Lin) merit the “high erotic” style of writing, because these women are Ximen Qing’s social and emotional equals, due to their cultural, economic, and social capital. A general rule in Ming-Qing fiction, McMahon argues, was that it should “avoid any explicit portrayal of the sex between ideal monogamous partners” (109). Although such ideal lovers rarely appear in Jin Ping Mei, the novel employs the high erotic mode based on a similar principle and uses it to affirm a legitimate and solid relationship, predict future affection, and invoke intense irony (87).

Unlike the “high erotic” style, the “graphic” style creates not a sublime effect, but a sensual one, capturing sights and sounds as if Ximen Qing and his partners “are performing in public for everyone to witness … as if they expect those witnesses to accept and condone what they do” (160). The “graphic” sex often intersects pleasure with pain and sometimes makes use of grotesque details. Jin Ping Mei does not necessarily cast such descriptions in a negative light; rather, they are all about “unfiltered excess,” extreme and overwhelming sexual pleasure (139–40). The novel’s “graphic” style of writing reveals the power dynamics between a privileged protagonist (usually a male but sometimes a female) and his or her subordinate sexual partner. For example, Ximen Qing expresses no concern that his unrestrained, raw sex with subordinates will elicit criticism, intervention, or punishment from his peers. Moreover, with his inner circle of “wanton women,” he feels free to engage in burning moxa on the woman’s body, fellatio, and other sexual practices that he steers clear of when having sex with his main wives or wife-like concubines. The novel’s wanton women, ranging from lowly servants to wet nurses, willingly participate in “graphic” sex in exchange for an improved financial or social status. Take, for example, Ximen Qing’s concubine Pan Jinlian, who is emotionally and sexually intimate with him. The novel frequently employs the high erotic mode to describe their sexual encounters. However, compared to other wife-like concubines, such as Li Ping’er and Meng Yulou, Pan Jinlian lacks wealth and status and must rely on Ximen Qing’s favoritism. Using her sexual allure and witty banter, she manipulates him and still willingly indulges his unrestrained sexual demands, even if she sometimes dislikes them—and more than once during and after their sex, she requests material compensation for her efforts. The passages describing these encounters are written mostly in a “graphic” style. As McMahon perceptively argues, “The rawest sex in Jin Ping Mei involves the women who most rely on it to gain favor” (163).

The novel sometimes combines the two styles. For example, Ximen Qing enters into a sexual relationship with the widow Lady Lin, whose high social status makes him feel inferior. The novel describes their initial sexual encounter as both sublime and passionless, the marker of “high erotic” sex. However, later in the novel, the widow needs Ximen Qing to protect her son. Her dependence on Ximen Qing has the effect of reversing the power dynamic between the two, and in a subsequent sexual encounter, he burns moxa on her breasts and vagina—a typical “ritual” in Ximen Qing’s “graphic” sex. Another example combining the two styles centers on Pan Jinlian’s affair with Ximen Qing’s son-in-law Chen Jingji: the sexual encounters between the two are written in a hybridized narrative style that McMahon refers to as the “idealizing (but also ironizing) effect of the mock high erotic” (105). Although the sexual scenarios described in Jin Ping Mei are hardly realistic representations of the typical sex lives of Ming subjects, McMahon’s analysis of the “high erotic” and “graphic” writing styles provides a vantage point from which to observe Ming-era emotional and sexual norms, whether real or imagined.

In the last two chapters, Chapter Seven (“Jin Ping Mei and Ming and Qing Pornography”) and Chapter Eight (“The Ways of Being Pornographic”), McMahon examines just how pornographic Jin Ping Mei was. To accomplish this analysis, he locates the novel within the context of other late-Ming and Qing pornographic fiction. Two major shifts appear: one is the tendency of the literature to vilify homoerotic sex after the early Qing era, and the other is an increasingly—and ironically—anti-pornographic attitude even in literature itself rightly categorized as pornographic. The latter shift was made possible by the development of popular generic storylines in which either (1) a sexually potent male protagonist saves wanton men and women in the depraved world through his uncompromising morality or (2) a morally rectified version of Ximen Qing enjoys a much tamer, more temperate sexual journey than the original Ximen Qing. McMahon’s analysis raises an important question: Were these significant changes in post-Jin Ping Mei pornographic literature unique to China, or were they more broadly global? This question is fascinating particularly insofar as both China and European countries increasingly interacted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, during that time, expanded their formal criminalization of homosexuality, especially when it involved males.

Saying All That Can Be Said offers a rich analysis of the sexual themes in Jin Ping Mei. McMahon convincingly demonstrates that the novel’s more notorious passages function not only to stimulate the reader but also to draw out the situational complexities of the various characters. McMahon has written a history of textual sexuality that focuses not so much on realistic representations of sex as on largely imagined (and perhaps sometimes realistic) representations of sex that reflect broader social, economic, cultural, and sexual practices.

McMahon’s admirable research brings to my mind a final, recurring question: To what extent did Jin Ping Mei, a hugely popular novel, influence Ming-Qing readers? Journey to the West, another famous Ming-era novel, serves as a compelling example of fiction shaping reality. The novel’s fictional protagonist, Sun Wukong, more commonly known as the Monkey King, became an object of worship across China. Can we similarly argue that the fictional representations of sex in Jin Ping Mei shaped real-world sexual views and practices in Ming-Qing China and even later? An exploration of this topic would certainly make for another enticing read.